Encountering a Mouse
This is part of the Mechanics of MouseHunt series of articles, go here for the main article.
As soon as a hunter begins a hunt they encounter a mouse, it does not matter how the hunt begins, it can be from an hourly check or a horn sounded by the hunter or one of the hunter’s friends.
The only two factors which are important at this stage are the location the hunter is in, and the cheese the hunter is using.
I believe that each location has a “pool” of mice that can be encountered in that location and make up the population of that location, normally the encountered mouse will be randomly drawn from this pool, however the cheese being used may change how mice are encountered.
A good example of the cheese changing the distribution of mice in an area is in the Acolyte Realm, when using Runic cheese a hunter will not encounter Gate Guardian mice in this location, however, if the hunter is using Ancient cheese, over half of the mice encountered are Gate Guardians. This is not simply a case of failing to attract the Gate Guardians normally, as Runic has a very high attraction rate in the Acolyte Realm, these Gate Guardians appear to make up an additional pool of mice in the area, which cannot be attracted with any cheese other than Ancient.
During special events there is an additional pool of mice that are not bound to any one location, each hunter has a chance to encounter a mouse from that pool instead of the normal pool for their location, this means that there is normally no “best” place to hunt for a prize mouse.
However, there are certain locations that do not have access to the special events mice pool, such as the Pinnacle Chamber, this has been confirmed by the developers.
Next: Stage 2: Attracting a Mouse
Tagged as analysis, encounter + Categorized as Analytics Articles
Paul,
You say that as soon as a hunt starts, the hunter will encounter a mouse; from that point on, it’s just a question of attraction.
Is it possible to not encounter a mouse ?
Take the pinnacle chamber with brie, for instance. The population for brie should be 100% hapless, yet the attraction rate is much (much!) lower than other areas.
Just wanted to give you confirmation that the cheese does impact the encounter rates of mice. This came from a recent discussion on the MouseHunt wiki.
In the Festive Comet the use of SUPER|brie+ lowers the encounter rate for “less desirable” mice, giving an side-effect of a slightly boosted encounter rate for Elf mice. The mouse itself is attracted to all bait types. –[[User:Dave Vanderburg|Dave Vanderburg]]
Pooflinger should make a tool that calculates the encounter rates in all the areas with all the cheeses.